Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication such as voice, packet data, and so on. These systems may be based on code division multiple access (CDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA), or other multiple access techniques to allow multiple devices to share a common communications medium. For example, such systems can conform to standards such as Third-Generation Partnership Project 2 (3gpp2, or “cdma2000”), Third-Generation Partnership (3gpp, or “W-CDMA”), or Long Term Evolution (“LTE”). In the design of such communications systems, it is desirable to maximize the capacity, or the number of users the system can reliably support, given the available resources. One technique for increasing the capacity of a communications system is to apply interference cancellation at a receiver to maximize the received signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) of each user. For example, in a communications system based on CDMA, a base station receiver may receive a mobile station's traffic signal in combination with interference from other mobile stations' traffic signals, as well as from all mobile stations' pilot signals. Conventional interference cancellation techniques may initially estimate and cancel interference from all users' pilot signals based on the known contents of the pilot signals, then estimate and cancel interference from other users' traffic signals as the contents of such traffic signals become known, e.g., through decoding the traffic signals.
As traffic signals are decoded, and other users' reconstructed traffic signals are cancelled from a received signal over time, it is expected that the pilot estimates may also be improved over their initial values. It would be desirable to take advantage of this to further improve the performance of communications receivers.